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Ted Kennedy’s Empty Seat and Stuff

Last  week at the hair salon, I was sitting in a chair and reading a magazine while I waited for my blondness to burgeon, and I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the youngish woman next to me banter with her hairdresser as her long brown hair was being installed with foil highlights. “Couldn’t help eavesdropping.” In fact, if my ears weren’t surrounded by caustic hair dye, I would have covered them with my hands to prevent eavesdropping on her various insipid serendipitous realizations that the world, in fact, revolves around her.

Foil highlights take a long time, and her small talk began to run dry. Then, “Isn’t all that Ted Kennedy stuff so sad?”

“What Ted Kennedy stuff?” the hairdresser asked.

“You know, about how he died?”

Yes, all that “stuff” about Ted Kennedy dying last month was so sad, but Massachusetts is moving on. Yesterday the State Senate approved a law that allows Governor Deval Patrick to appoint an interim successor to Kennedy’s Senate seat, a measure which may have some affect on national health care reform given the Democrat’s razor-thin two-thirds majority. Ironically, this law had been active up until John Kerry’s unfortunate Presidential bid, when Massachusetts began having nightmares about then-Governor Mitt the Mormon appointing some whacknut Republican to fill Kerry’s Senate seat, so a law was passed that unfilled Senate seats should remain empty until the special election. Perhaps we should feel more sheepish about passing blatantly partisan laws, but come on. Like we’re going to disregard Ted Kennedy’s dying wish. That’s how plagues start!

So, freed of that little snag, the real question is: Who is going to win the special election for Kennedy’s Senate seat in January? As of today, no Kennedys have thrown their gold-plated names into the hat, leaving the Democrats with the typical menu of options: Entrenched Massachusetts pols (Attorney General Martha Coakley, Congressmen Michael Capuano and Stephen Lynch), business moguls (Boston Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca), and liberal fringe long-shots who everybody would like to see in the Senate but, for some reason, nobody ever votes for (City Year co-founder Alan Khazei).

For a brief, scary time period, it seemed possible that former Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling might run on the Republican ticket. Really. Stop laughing, I’m serious.

By virtue of Shilling’s ability to throw a tiny ball really fast, with a high degree of accuracy, and while suffering a ruptured ankle tendon, Shilling had been encouraged to run for the US Senate by a number of Republicans for whom he has campaigned, included Senator John McCain (if McCain’s vision of Sarah Palin as Vice President didn’t testify to the man’s senility, surely this?) And Shilling seemed to be toying with the idea, perhaps intoxicated by the prospect of sauntering into the Senate, his three World Series rings sparkling in the dimly lit chamber, his wife Shonda firmly at his side… but ultimately even Shilling found the notion re-freaking-diculous. “It just did not make sense,” he admitted as he bowed out yesterday on an HBO talk show (here).

So right now, the smart money is on Martha Coakley. Of course, if Joe Kennedy decides to run, even the dumb money is on Joe.

Posted in In the News, Massachusetts.

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